John W. Billheimer, et al., reported in Mar. 1990, USE OF VIDEOTAPE IN HOV LANE SURVEILLANCE AND ENFORCEMENT FINAL REPORT, that the enforcement of California's HOV lanes required substantial commitments of California Highway Patrol (CHP) personnel and equipment. Personnel costs for enforcing the state's ten mainline HOV lanes exceeded $400,000 in 1990. HOV lane enforcement has other costs as well. These include the risks of high-speed pursuit in lanes adjacent to stop-and-go traffic, and the deterioration of traffic flow when tickets are issued during peak commute periods. It was suggested that using video equipment to assist in HOV lane enforcement could reduce the requirements for patrol officers, increase citation rates, and minimize freeway disruption. Their investigation was designed to extend past studies of HOV lane enforcement by testing both the feasibility and accuracy of the use of video equipment in HOV lane surveillance.
The principal purposes of violation enforcement systems include catching and fining violators, and establishing a deterrent for future violations. Intense police enforcement can be prohibitively expensive and socially unacceptable. The costs of deploying and operating the enforcement system are traded off against the enforcement rate that yields an effective deterrence, e.g., acceptable limit on violator rate.
In order to deter violators, law enforcement must be able to collect fines from any vehicle, since any vehicle can be a violator. Fee collection requires a video-based billing system, and labor costs are the overriding cost driver of such systems. Cost-effective video enforcement requires a highly integrated system design. Many thousands of images cannot be processed by individuals without some kind of computerized assistance. So computers and video should be used to screen-out non-violations, and human operators can be assigned to verify violations in images flagged by the computer.
In general, video enforcement systems require 1) image capture, 2) violation detection, 3) vehicle identification, 4) owner identification, 5) bill issuance, 6) payment processing, 7) dispute resolution, 8) unpaid bills enforcement and collection, and 9) automatic system monitoring.
Using officers to enforce HOV lanes consumes a valuable resource. Not all occupants are readily visible, e.g., small children, adults laying down, or others not otherwise visible through the windows of the vehicle. Some vehicle windows can be hard to see through, especially at night, during rain/snow, in sun glare, or when tinted/metallized. Utilizing expensive multi-spectral cameras and processing techniques to detect human flesh inside vehicles and thereby thwart cheaters who would use dummies or mannequins to fool an automated system is not worth the added expense since people in heavy makeup or wearing masks would not be detected. Pulling over HOV violators is dangerous, disruptive, and time-consuming.